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Help with composition and other

Hey guys hope you can help with this.
I'm working on a landscape painting but the composition is driving me nuts for some reason i want to look at the right side of the image more than the character but don't know why. In general i seem to struggle a LOT with composition and iv'e looked at tutorials online n stuff but cant get my head around it... sometimes ill spend hours moving things about and still nothing.. what am i doing wrong?

The Following User Says Thank You to LaCan For This Useful Post:

Well, I quite like what you've got already, but I think the issue you mention is because you have lit and textured rocks on the right, and a saturated area of grass - these will draw attention. You could try dialling those back a bit and maybe push the light more where the character is?

The Following User Says Thank You to Mythmaker For This Useful Post:

I think your right thanks well your both right i did kinda skip the thumbnail but had an idea of what i wanted so thanks to both Originally i had the cowboy on the right and close up but then he was hogging the environment all my attention was going to him.

So question, should i have one or two focal points in a landscape scene? If i put the cowboy up close and to the right do i need to place something of more interest at the back left?

There's a lot of good stuff going on in this painting. It's got a really nice classic feel to it. I think where you've possibly mis-stepped is that you're adding a lot of things where you don't need to and often less is more.

I made a tighter crop to try and frame the action better (i.e. I don't see how the extra silhouette of the trees on the left says anything but if you bring it in a bit it actually frames the painting naturally. I also deleted a bunch of features which weren't really contributing to the painting overall and were just drawing your eye away from the cowboy. i.e. the rocks in the foreground and dark shapes and funny looking mountain thing. Either make that mountain a feature - i.e. he's riding towards it or just delete it?

I can see that you might be feeling like it's not a super exciting piece after all, it's a cowboy riding on some classic rockies landscape but I think that interest and intrigue could come from some story telling. For instance, you could stick a wolf in the foreground to the right looking at the cowboy and this would create some nice tension between him and the wolf - it would give the viewer a reason to traverse the distance across the canvas and it would also add some story telling... i.e. is the wolf following him? Why is he following him? blah blah...

There's certainly a lot you could do to make this shine as it has a solid foundation to it.

Oh and if you want to watch me paint live I recently got introduced to this thing called picarto TV... It's nice to do art and share it - if you have any questions it's great to talk too! I'm painting pretty much 12 hours a day so you'll most likely find me - unless I'm eating

The Following User Says Thank You to Kelvin Liew For This Useful Post:

Hey guys thanks for the feedback it helped a lot
Kelvin you were spot on with your adjustments here. I went with what you said about croping the canvas and taking out that weird mountain point, I did try adding a wolf like you said but the story was too intense. I went with what Mythmaker said and dialled back those foreground rocks because I wanted to keep them there. I also moved the cowboy to what seems to me to be a better position, closer to one of the thirds. Anyway's did a second pass on it and it seems to be better.